


Evening Gray and Morning Red

by Nemonus



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Age Difference, Awkwardness, F/M, Huddling For Warmth, Sharing a Bed, Unhealthy Relationships, it's awkward for them it's awkward for me it's awkward for the reader
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-04-08
Packaged: 2018-10-16 06:18:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10565367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Aloy and Sylens take the same path on the way to the Nora lands, for a little while. Mutual self-interest indeed; Aloy is in furious pursuit of knowledge, and he has some written on his skin.





	

They lost one strider to stalkers, and Aloy was too busy dodging sparks to see whether Sylens fought for it.  
  
The machine flashed in and out of invisibility above her, the liquid batteries on its back glowing pale yellow like a disease. She couldn’t aim precisely under its thrashing leg, but she didn’t have to; her spear caught under the joint and she wrenched it in, leaning until the leg cracked and the stalker fell. Its head hit the grass inches from her, metal plates scraping her clothes. She turned in the circle of its twitching forelimbs and drove the spear back in through its sensor stalks.  
  
A quick look up to see what else might be barreling toward her revealed only two blue glows and a corpse; Sylens was standing with one hand on the living strider. This one had been his. Hers had gone down under another stalker, both bodies now a knife-edged pile taller than a person.  
  
Aloy said, “Well that’s just great.”  
  
“We’ll find another strider.” Sylens walked toward her, apparently unconcerned, as she pulled her spear back out of the wreck. “We’ll get ahead of the storm.”  
  
Clouds were piling on the horizon. Aloy frowned at the storm, frustrated by both the weather and her own inability to have noticed it during the fight. The Sun - the Carja’s precious Sun, another non-god among a desert crowded with machines - had turned its face. Would have been convenient for the Sun-Ring to be overcast when Helis had tried to sacrifice her to a beast.  
  
She rubbed at the thin white scar across her neck. It was that which made her hesitate, more than the storm. “No. We’ll wait it out and follow. Catch them while they’re recovering, if the storm moves east. That pile will work as a windbreak.” She waved at the stalker that had died as it lunged over the strider.  
  
“The armies aren't going to be moving in this weather either,” he said, as if it had been his idea.  
  
“There could be more stalkers here.”  
  
“And they won’t care if we stay still. Or do you think that we can’t take care of them too?”  
  
_We._ Had he fought? “Okay. Okay, we can do this.”  
  
_We._ She approached the strider’s side, dug through metal shards. Her travel pack was wedged between the two machines, cut by the angled edges she had seen the Cauldrons so carefully sculpt. Every _we_ had felt disingenuous when she had been underneath Sunfall, when she had been doing the running while he talked. There had been promises in his hints, before, and those promises had driven her until she simplified them, distinguished her fight from his voice. She would find her mother, but that was her fight alone. She had begun to think of his dependency as something else.  
  
And now - he had said he’d run two striders into the ground to get here. Typical Sylens - even more than typical to sound so wounded over work he had only watched.  
  
She pulled her pack from between the machines. Her blanket unfolded easily, but the bowls and tines inside were broken, and the rope fraying.  
  
Aloy fumed. Already, she could hardly see the windbreak through the fog and rain. The storm might not come over the mountains. The plan might not work. She might be too late into the mountain, too late to find Varl and Teersa and -  
  
Sylens had begun to build a lean-to from ridge-wood and metal, up against the stalker’s side. There was something grim about cannibalizing the strider while its companion stood, head down in the wind.  
  
“My supplies are broken,” Aloy said.  
  
“Does it matter? We’ll sleep here for a few hours, until the storm lets up.”  
  
If they had kept going she would have had to bring him along with her on the one remaining strider, closer than the bunks in the proving-house. “Fine,” she muttered.  
  
She propped more metal plates up while he pulled his own supplies from his pack. The wind and the rain arrived at about the same time, spooking the strider enough that it shouldered Sylens. Aloy hid a smile while she shoved her bedroll into the shelter.  
  
By the time he ducked into the lean-to, pulling the strider behind him as a cantankerous third wall, Aloy had rolled herself in her blanket and propped her chin on her hands. It felt better to lay with her face toward the door, her legs underneath her so that she knew she could stand up if she needed. She had stowed her spear beside her, close enough that she could feel it against her shoulder.  
  
Sylens could hardly fit into the space that was left; he thumped onto the ground with his back to her and begun shifting at strider guts, trying to make more room. Aloy had filled in the lean-to quickly but effectively, and his movements were only giving the rain more paths to run down. He pulled the blanket in after him in silent irritation while the wind started to whip the trees, adding its sound to the rushing rain. More movement while he laboriously unhooked the metal band from around his shoulders and Aloy tried to shut out the sound.  
  
By the time he settled down he sighed like a bellows, and Aloy squeezed her eyes shut. “I didn’t cause the weather,” she said.  
  
“I never said you did.”  
  
“You’re complaining.”  
  
Another sigh. “A few days with my voice in your ear and you know how _complaining_ sounds?”  
  
“It doesn’t take scanning to figure that out.”  
  
The storm made it abundantly clear which parts of the lean-to’s hasty construction had been most effective. Cold wind hit the top of her head, and Sylens shifted away from the rivulets now running in determined streams down the side of Aloy’s strider. His tension was stressing her out, so she tugged on the back of his shirt to give quiet permission for him to move further from the wreckage.  
  
Instead of simply shifting over he turned, fixing her with a tired stare for a moment before shutting his eyes, realizing the look had gone on too long. He had apologized to her for saying that her mother was a machine. He had apologized for that single statement out of so many. She had to believe that she had a family to find, but was doubting more and more that she could even guess what that family would look like.  
  
The wires woven into his skin glowed pale green in the dark. Aloy usually wrapped her Focus in a bundle nearby while she slept, close enough to wake her with its sound but not drive her to distraction with the light or the hard metal. The Focus Sylens had given her was as comfortable in her hand as the one Helis had crushed.  
  
She had never been in love, she had told Elida. Certainly never like that, in an all-consuming way in which she felt she couldn’t live without another person. She had swam a river for Elida - did that mean she loved as strongly as Elida did? Maybe Aloy had felt that much loyalty to Rost, but he had been dead by the time she had known it.  
  
If she moved toward Sylens only slightly, she could kiss him. The blankets were beginning to warm, and his skin would be warmer; he would open his mouth against hers and there would be a bit of hatred in the kiss. There would be another reckoning, another negotiation, a silent decision about which of them would get what they wanted in this as in everything else. Were the cords cool or warm where they pierced his face?  
  
Instead, she touched the latticework on his arm. He opened his eyes to give her a look of lazy disapproval.  
  
She muttered, “Were you Banuk?”  
  
“What made you think that?”  
  
The cords were cool and his skin was warm. She allowed herself a moment of satisfaction at having been right. “Your disdain for their religious traditions seemed particularly bitter.”  
  
“It isn’t a religion. More of a … philosophy.”  
  
Did her eyes look so tired? “The Banuk I saw were taming machines with some kind of transmitter.”  
  
“It is different in Ban-Ur.”  
  
“So you are Banuk!”  
  
“Were. You said it right before. I would think you could do it again.”  
  
Aloy scoffed. This close, he closed his eyes and grimaced against her blown breath. It just made the urge to laugh stronger.  
  
“Quiet. There are already machines out there. Do you want to draw more?”  
  
Aloy buried her face in the inner lining of her bedroll. She had scraped and sewn the furs herself, and the thick smell brought memories of nights from the Sacred Land to the burning desert. Underneath it now was the smell of Sylens’ sweat and machine oil.  
  
He put an arm around her and drew her closer. “Shh.” The tone was more impatient than cajoling.  
  
With her face covered she was quiet already, so she reached over Sylens to pull his heavy blanket over his face. The stitching felt Banuk, too. He thought he was so mysterious, but wore the marks of his home as surely as she did. He let out an exasperated breath against her hair.  
  
“I’m not the one who glows,” Aloy whispered.  
  
“It’s …” he stopped.  
  
“Banuk tradition you don’t want to talk about?” Now the air under the blankets was getting close and humid, almost too hot. She would have to stay where she was if she didn’t want to admit defeat.  
  
“I’m going to touch you,” he said.  
  
Her mind went very quiet, catching on the fact that they were already touching. He had asked permission, though. Quietly she gave it.  
  
He tangled his right hand in her collar, fumbling in the cloth for the beads she wore. When he drew the necklace into the blue-green light his fingers brushed her mouth. “These are made of clay. The cords I wear are made of Watcher filaments, what the Banuk call the sinew. Both are common and aren’t toxic.”    
  
“I’m going to touch you,” she said.  
  
He didn’t answer.  
  
When she ran her fingers over the top of his head he closed his eyes, his expression slackening. The cords above his ear were tighter against his skin than the ones on his face, and had taken some of the warmth of the blanket. He wasn’t wearing his Focus either, she realized suddenly, and felt more exposed than she had when she had settled down. Her fingertips brushed the warm skin at the top of his ear, and the next sigh into her hair was gentler.  
  
“Thank you for helping me find Elizabet’s office,” she whispered. “And for breaking into the Sun-Ring.”  
  
“We’ll see if it leads us to any greater knowledge.” His voice was softer when he talked about concepts, about pure information. It was difficult for him to see people as more than part of the landscape, Aloy thought, and Sylens pressed his face against her hair over her ear, and did not sigh again.  
  
They had both been right about the duration of the storm. The wind wore itself out on the trees, and what was left of the rainwater started to drop off the living strider’s flanks as it stamped in front of the lean-to in the morning. Aloy drowsed, damp but not cold. Sylens, silent, nudged her knees.  
  
Aloy shoved his shoulder. Did he wake up like this wherever he lived, in whatever workshop or Focus-strewn forge? Did he wake up alone?  
  
Probably, seeing as he pushed blankets out of the way gracelessly and lurched outside without barely opening his eyes. The tame strider had moved a body-length away, snuffling at the grass. Aloy moved to its head and checked the blue tubing. Still secure, still tame enough to ride. Sylens could take this one to wherever he had wanted to go.  
  
Aloy needed to reach the Nora.  
  
She heard footsteps near the lean-to, but didn’t look up as she packed her blanket and the metal shards and secured the Focus next to her ear. She marched east, and as far as she knew, he didn’t follow.

* * *

  
  
Weeks later in Meridian she would think of this and call out to him before dismissing him as another ghost. The Focus he had given her lay like a chip of crystal on the table in Olin’s apartment. If Sylens had answered, what would he say? Pragmatic advice for the battle? He had already given whatever stark encouragement he could muster. Maybe he would sit on the edge of the bed and she would kiss him, with more surety and less desperation than she had imagined. Maybe she would die tomorrow, and there would be no ghosts again. 


End file.
